Science Tuesday.

It's kind of funny that it is only the SECOND day of summer vacation....and the whines of "I don't have anybody to play with"s and the "I don't have anything to do"s reared their ugly heads today. My approach to summer vacation is what I called "unstructured structure"; most days are about just riding bikes and playing with friends and swimming in the pool and taking mini-trips into town and trips to the beach and picnics at the park or on the front lawn.....whatever moves us.

However, I also have "spots" of structure that I inject into each day....reading time, science time, reading time, math time, art time, computer time, etc. I firmly believe that kids need to be kids and they need plenty of room and space for freedom and exploration and, YES, even boredom. When I think back to the summer days of my childhood, the most creative plans were born out of boredom......making forts, playing Swiss Family Robinson, creating neighborhood clubs, planning and running Bible school for the younger kids....such great memories, and all stemming from my mother's instruction to "Go out and play."

The "spot of structure" today was all about science; we have informally declared Tuesdays "Science Tuesdays" for the summer. Today, we made GOO. During the activity, we talked about science concepts like "dissolve" and learned about measurements and fractions as we measured ingredients.....and states of matter (solid, liquid, gas).....and just had plain fun creating blue and pink goo and making goo monsters with lots of googly eyes. The kids had a great time creating....I'm pretty confident that I could home-school my kids effectively and creatively, so I like getting little tastes of what that might be like if we had chosen that route for our family.....which we haven't, as we believe quite strongly in public school education. Anyway, that whole discussion is for another post on another day.....We happily survived day 2 and even learned a little bit along the way.